The Battle for Hong Kong 1941-1945

by Oliver Lindsay

  Feb. 8

  Two Chinamen shot by Japs just outside our wire, probably for looting or trying to sell food through wire. Japs gave us a piano, palms in pots, 100 brooms for our mess.

  Feb. 10

  Conditions in camp hospital still appalling – no medicines, no aspirins, no milk or proper food for convalescents …

  * * * * *

  Rollcall parades were held daily in Shamshuipo. Some men brought their musical instruments into the camp and so a band was formed, making concerts possible. Some Europeans who had not yet been interned passed food and medicines through the wire to their friends in the camp, as did Chinese. Unfortunately I knew virtually nobody who could bring me such things.

  The Japanese guards in the towers around the camp were very cruel. I saw them many times opening fire with machine guns on families, including babies, in sampans who were crossing the harbour collecting food: the rowing stopped, we could hear the cries of the terrified men, women and children, before the sampans drifted lifeless away on the tide. A Chinese man paid with his life when he unwittingly brought a drum of water into the camp when the Commandant was expecting a drum of oil. Every day Japanese sentries would gather some Chinese together, tie tins on their ankles so that they couldn’t move without the tins making a noise on the cobbles, and then line them up at the edge of the harbour, before bayoneting them – just as they had done to the POWs at Repulse Bay. I saw their bodies drifting away in the water and other horrible things and can picture them today, just as I can remember seeing and hearing people in my midst who were dying. If you asked me today what my firm was doing 20 years ago, I would have difficulty telling you, but some of the terrible things I witnessed over 60 years ago will be with me forever. The Japanese were indeed a cruel people.

  Shamshuipo was really awful: it was almost the worst part of the war for me. I, like others, thought we would never see our parents again; we despaired of ever returning to our homes.

  Inevitably, people’s minds turned to the possibility of escaping. The most fortunate were the surviving crews of the Motor Torpedo Boats, who evaded capture with the one-legged Admiral Chan Chak; he was one of Chiang Kai-shek’s representatives in Hong Kong. After many adventures 62 British reached Kunming before travelling 600 miles to Burma, and on 23rd February 1942 sailing to India, ahead of the rapidly advancing Japanese. The full story is told in Oliver Lindsay’s At the Going Down of the Sun.4

  There were a few escapes by very courageous men. All but one took place in the early period of imprisonment when the Japanese were least organised, the POWs’ health had not deteriorated, and Maltby’s policy of not escaping had not been imposed.

  The most significant escape took place in January 1942 from Shamshuipo Camp. Lieutenant Colonel L T Ride, who had fought in France in the First World War, held the post of Dean of the Medical Faculty in Hong Kong Hospital and had commanded the Volunteer Field Ambulance during the Japanese invasion.

  “All Colonel Ride’s leisure for the past few years had been given freely to public service designed to prepare the Colony against the Japanese attack which he saw as inevitable,” read a British report in May 1942. “He set himself the highest standards of citizenship and patriotism; apathy, wishful-thinking and inefficiency he regarded with bitter and outspoken contempt. If our Colonies were populated with Rides, we would run an Empire which would be the marvel of the age.”5

  On the afternoon of Christmas Day, Colonel Ride noticed that the enemy shelled more hospitals than usual for it indicated “that the Japanese fight according to the rules of warfare only as long as it suits them”. On 29th December Ride reported to Maltby that he had found the bodies of over 50 Navy, Army and Air Force who had been murdered in one location alone. A week later he told the General that the POWs would soon fall victim to dysentery and cholera because of the primitive medical facilities, the meagre diet and lack of drugs. “I was convinced,” recalls Colonel Ride, “that to save the POWs’ lives someone must escape and either force the Japanese to alter their policy to look after the prisoners adequately, or to smuggle in medicines into the camps from China. I decided I must escape quickly.”6

  Ride escaped by sampan at night on 9th January with three others – two from the HKRN Volunteer Reserve and Ride’s former clerk. They quickly reached China, to start organising help for the POWs with enormous difficulty. General Maltby was unenthusiastic when consulted beforehand on their attempt to escape.

  On 10th January the Japanese interrogated Major J N Crawford, the Second in Command of the Field Ambulance: “Where is Ride, the Senior Medical Officer?” they demanded. Crawford replied that he had never heard of such a man and that he, Crawford, was the Senior Medical Officer. The Japanese left thoroughly perplexed: there were no repercussions because they could not establish what had happened.

  On 31st January General Maltby sent for Captain A G Hewitt, the Adjutant of the Middlesex Regiment, having heard from his Commanding Officer, H W M Stewart, that he wanted to escape with two others – Captain Douglas Scriven, the Battalion’s medical officer and Pilot Officer D Crossley from New Zealand. Maltby listened to his plans and gave him two letters, written beforehand, for the British Embassy in Chungking. He also arranged for Hewitt to have 800 Hong Kong dollars. “It was most encouraging, but the General did not wish me good luck, nor indicate in any way whether he approved of my attempt to escape. Perhaps he did not wish to become involved,” concluded Hewitt.7 That night they escaped successfully under the wire and on to a waiting sampan. I remember well seeing the sampan arrive on which they escaped.

  The following night three others also slipped under the wire from Shamshuipo – Major J H Munro, Flying Officer Moore and Captain I B Trevor of the Volunteers. They swam for 40 minutes pushing a small raft they had made themselves from firewood. On it were ten tins of bully beef from friends’ treasured secret stocks.

  Two Royal Scots Privates, J Gallacher and D Hodges, also slipped past the Japanese sentries, reaching the British in China, who arranged for them to be returned to Britain.

  By now the Japanese were seriously concerned at these successful escapes, aware that the POWs who reached China would pass on important information. Moreover the loss of face was intolerable. The Japanese responded by suspending in February the ‘parcel day’ by which large parcels could be delivered openly to the POW camps. A report from the International Red Cross in July states that the ‘parcel days’ were not resumed until later that month, and then stopped again until December 1942 due to more escapes.

  In early February they arrested four RAF officers – Wing Commanders H G Sullivan and H T Bennett with Flight Lieutenant H B Gray and F Hennesey. They were thrown into an overcrowded cell in Saigon; it was so full of Japanese defaulters that they could not lie down. Sullivan, the senior RAF officer who had fought in Hong Kong, fell seriously ill with amoebic dysentery and was removed to a Japanese military prison where he was given fruit and illustrated papers by friendly Japanese patients who had been wounded in Malaya. “On 9th February 1942 I was given a banana to celebrate the fall of Singapore and on the Emperor’s birthday we received seaweed as a great treat,” remembers Sullivan. “In July we were returned to Hong Kong in a freighter with a gaping hole in her side where she had been torpedoed.”8 The voyage was remarkable for the kindness of the Japanese crew, soldiers and ‘comfort girls’ who continuously offered the RAF officers sweets, fruit, whisky and coconuts. “The Japanese were a weird crowd,” he concluded.

  Major General Maltby had become increasingly concerned that the trickle of POWs who escaped were endangering the lives of the remainder; the health of many was already in serious jeopardy. We have seen how the ‘parcel days’ had been stopped.

  In April 1942 there took place the most controversial escape due to Maltby’s policy: the story, well documented, can be told for the first time. It must be remembered that in the British Army, and probably in others, soldiers were encouraged, in principle, to escape: it was their duty to do so.

&n
bsp; Three Royal Artillery officers – Captain J D Clague, Lieutenants J L C Pearce and L S White, with Sergeant D I Bosanquet of the Volunteers, had discovered a man-hole giving access to a typhoon drain which ran under the camp for over 50 yards to the sea.

  Clague had some reservations on the few escapers who were leaving their families in Hong Kong. He was particularly thinking of Pearce, who had a brother and mother in the Colony; the escapers would have to “bear the consequences and suffer for the remainder of their lives from appalling feelings of personal guilt over what subsequently happened to their loving families,” Clague felt. (Sir Douglas Clague Kt CBE, MC, became a man of immense wealth and influence in post-war Hong Kong.)

  Major General Maltby’s policy, by now, was not to permit escapes “by small parties or even individuals… the general standard of health had reached a very low level,” he wrote after the war. “Any escape would have caused severe and immediate repercussions and further privations would have been fatal to many, and further, there was the probability of transfer to Formosa or Japan, from which places there was no escape.”9 Maltby began to consider a mass break-out instead. This extraordinary project will be discussed later.

  Clague was told to see Maltby. The General flatly refused to give his assent to Clague’s escape. They “were acting irresponsibly and without consideration”. Duggie Clague was furious. He saw “Maltby again and said ‘we’re going in 45 minutes’ and he still didn’t approve. Duggie was given neither task nor encouragement.”

  Their disappearance would be discovered by the guards at the morning roll-call. They would therefore have only a 10-hour head start after they had made landfall at Laichikok before a full-scale search would be made for them. Colonel Newnham, Maltby’s principal operations officer and a key man in the story which will in due course unfold, agreed with Maltby and tried to discourage the escape, but changed his mind and said “if you’ve got a plan, put it into effect”.

  Colonel Newnham got up to leave them. “As he reached the door he turned, undid the top button of his battledress and pulled out a carefully folded piece of paper and said, ‘There is a map. I will be back in 20 minutes to collect it,’” wrote David Bosanquet in his memoirs.10 Much of the next 20 minutes were spent poring over the map memorising what they could.

  Some four months later, on 20th August, four brave men of the Winnipeg Grenadiers escaped from North Point Camp. Their sampan sank when they were trying to cross to the Mainland. They were picked up by the Japanese Navy, beaten with a baseball bat and then shot without trial. Two Royal Engineer Other Ranks were also executed after an unsuccessful escape attempt.

  Meanwhile, led by Clague, the four from Shamshuipo crawled through the typhoon drain. (I, with others, tapped on the ground above the drain with a pole, using a pre-arranged code to indicate the location of the Japanese guards.) The escapers then swam to some boat-building yards, were helped by friendly Chinese, as were all other escapers from Shamshuipo, and boarded a junk which took them beyond danger.

  The Japanese counted us at roll-call the next morning as usual and so discovered their absence. In Nazi POW camps, Allied POWs sometimes managed to fool the Germans into thinking no escape had taken place; but after the first few weeks in Hong Kong’s camps, the Japanese roll-calls were very thorough.

  On thinking about it now, I feel that Maltby’s policy of discouraging individual or small groups escaping was the most appropriate and realistic one. The Japanese authorities had made it abundantly clear that they had no intention of abiding by the rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war as laid down by the Geneva Convention. Our enemy had also made it plain to Maltby and others that POW escapes, whether successful or not, would be met with severe individual and collective punishment, including the drastic reduction or withdrawal of rations and medical supplies, which were already at a critical level. Many men were already beginning to suffer from deficiency diseases.

  I would re-emphasise that I held the General in high regard. Ralph Goodwin, an RNZNVR officer, expressed the opinion of many when he wrote that General Maltby “was in an unfortunate position. Left in command of a weakly defended outpost of the Empire which had no hope of prolonged resistance, he then found himself in internal charge of a prison camp under guards who cared nothing for the Geneva Convention. Time and again he was called upon to protest to the Japanese Commandant against the actions of the guards, and he took great risks of personal injury in pressing his demands.”

  It is true that Clague, Ride and some other escapers were to play a significant part in helping the POWs, as this book will relate, but the consequences for some were to prove truly catastrophic.

  We must now return to the early days of our imprisonment as Guests of the Emperor, as one ex-POW called his book!

  Notes

  1. Jason Wordie, in Ruins of War, p. 213, gives lower figures for Japanese casualties.

  2. Not all POWs agree the date of the march to Shamshuipo Camp. Perhaps the move was spread over several days.

  3. Letter Wallis to OL.

  4. Lindsay, Oliver, At the Going Down of the Sun, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981, pp. 5–21.

  5. Loose Minute 29.5.42, CO 129 590/25 HN 00152.

  6. Interview Sir Lindsay Ride with OL.

  7. Interview Colonel A G Hewitt with OL.

  8. Letter Sullivan to OL.

  9. Goodwin, Ralph, Passport to Eternity, London: Arthur Barker, 1956, p. 5.

  10. Bosanquet, David, Escape Through China, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982, p. 68.

  CHAPTER 17

  Argyle Street Officers’ Camp

  In April 1942, most unexpectedly, 336 officers and up to 100 soldiers (ostensibly to act as batmen) were paraded at Shamshuipo. We marched off in an easterly direction, not knowing where we were going. It took six hours to get to the Argyle Street POW camp in Kowloon, after the Japanese had searched and counted us. I was carrying my kit bag.

  The camp had been built initially to house Chinese Nationalist troops who had sought refuge in Hong Kong from the Japanese. The enemy used the camp for prisoners of war. Colonel Ride visited it after the surrender and found about 1,200 prisoners there – largely Rajputs and Punjabis. He saw 100 dysentery cases lying on the cold concrete floors. “Pools of blood, mucus and pus lay everywhere, and what was not sucked up by the swarms of eager flies, soaked into the ground,” he recalled. Cholera, which was endemic in Kowloon, would certainly slay those whom dysentery had failed to kill.

  The Indians and others had then been moved largely to the Mau Tau Chung Camp nearby. It is visible on the back cover of this book. While Argyle Street was briefly empty, the looters, as at Shamshuipo, had systematically stolen everything movable.

  I saw immediately that our camp was completely bare. The Japanese had made no preparations to meet us. There was no rice cooker. The first meal, inevitably of rice, had to be sent in. We had to beg the Japanese for equipment and to pool anything useful.

  It was inevitable, I suppose, that the Japanese would separate most of the officers from the soldiers who were left in Shamshuipo. Similar events had happened in Singapore when the officers were moved to Changi. On their 17-mile forced march with little food, the “arrogant and brutal behaviour of the Japanese soldier was apparent. This was manifested by the casual shooting of Chinese or Tamils perceived to be obstructing the column’s progress in any way.”1

  The Argyle Street Camp was surrounded by high and electrified wire fencing with up to a half a dozen guard towers which were always manned and contained searchlights.

  * * * * *

  Just before moving from Shamshuipo we were joined on 11th April by Brigadier Wallis who wrote: “I had been sent to the Bowen Road Hospital as my injury would not heal and was getting worse. The Commanding Officer of the Winnipeg Grenadiers, J L R Sutcliffe, died in the bed opposite me on 6th April.” His death was attributed to beriberi, dysentery and anaemia “but in the opinion of some of his officers he died from dejection and melancholia caused by criti
cal self-evaluation of his own battle performance,” recorded a Canadian historian.2

  The Japanese let the Protestant Chaplains, together with a number of Canadian officers, attend Sutcliffe’s funeral. Tokunaga and other Japanese officials were also there, bringing floral tributes for the Canadians and themselves to lay on the grave.

  Another officer in Bowen Road Hospital was Major Charles Boxer, whose optimistic reports on the Japanese immediately before the war so misled Major General Maltby. “He had been in charge of intelligence at Fortress HQ,” continues Wallis. “He was a fluent Jap scholar and was given a separate room where he was constantly visited by Jap officers to whom I felt he was inclined to be unnecessarily friendly. He was also visited by a lady who had half Chinese and half American nationality who had not been interned. Boxer made me feel uneasy and suspicious. I was taken aback to see how intimate he was with the Japanese.”3

  Another wounded officer who came to know Boxer well in hospital was the one-legged Captain ‘Bill’ Wiseman of the Royal Army Service Corps. He saw Boxer being visited by Japanese officers whom he had come to know during his many visits to the frontier. They brought Boxer presents, Wiseman recalls, including canned fruit and a crate of whisky. Wiseman once awoke to see the Japanese bowing towards him (Wiseman) “and making various appreciative noises”. Afterwards the curious Wiseman asked Boxer why they had been so respectful. Boxer replied that he had told the Japanese that Wiseman had “acquired his wooden leg while extending his foot in an unsuccessful attempt to stop a German tank at Dunkirk”. Some found Boxer’s sense of humour, like his behaviour, puzzling.

  Brigadier Wallis, while recovering from his injury, was able to leave Bowen Road Hospital several times “by showing an expired Japanese pass which I was given in North Point; it bore a prominent Jap chop (seal). I calculated correctly that most Jap sentries were probably unable to read. I was thus able to visit American consular friends but my luck ran out. There was a chronic shortage of electric light bulbs; the hospital nurses had theirs stolen when they were on duty. So I spotted an old sofa on the veranda and cut out the back cover (where the Japs could not see it) and I sewed some 20 small bags with a string fastener and the girls could carry these with them to keep their own bulb safe.